30 April 2010

for reasons, I can't remember or even hope to explain. The Gumbles could be squashed into any shape, and I liked that. I think they may have had some musical ability too, with florid songs mesmering themselves and the Bottersnikes...and I think I remember them tape recording things and editing them like little mini-Burroughs's...

29 April 2010

Been listening to Autotistic, in amongst the mire - it's an intense listen, all on it's lonesome, frazzling, blessed and burdened (in all senses of both words) by echo, lots of echo, echoes of echo... a sustained Acid trailer in sound...

I'd play it in stages, I really would... it literally get on your nerves when you play 2 or 3 tracks together... I don't mean this as a bad thing.

It's a kind of spirit dub but not the one you're thinking of if you've heard that term before... a kind of dub where the guitar slews slip and slide against one another, where little frozen shapes of feedback are found and then thrown to the winds... there's a lot of air here but it's difficult to breathe, like hanging your head out of a fast moving car...

It works for me better as a sideways glance, slipping inbetween other things; sounds perfect between some crystalline techno, a sliding scale between the beats... my favourite tracks - Slum Plastics, Milky Moan - have an odd sense of rhythm that seems to exist behind the music...

Somewhere, in the middle of roaring air and ebb and flows and clusters there's a sample or something of a voice saying something like: 'Are You Okay?' and it's a perfect sample, a perfect expression of the psychedelic gouging that I'm sure is at the heart of this record...

I have just played 4 tracks straight though so I could well be imagining that voice.

26 April 2010

as a supplement to John's Uncarvings on the Throbbing Gristle Ltd. Astoria gig... here's some adverts you might remember... I can vividly remember staring at these and wondering... really wish I'd got off my arse and up to London... in them days it seemed so far away...

25 April 2010

24 April 2010

Round here, a place of dreams. I heard my first Ramleh track here. And, on the same day, the whole of that Rick Wakeman King Arthur thing. Then someone set themselves on fire while Baby Ford was playing and Crackling House was born.

It's also one of the few places you can say 'course when I was a lad there were none of these pesky stone circles fucking up the view' and not be a spastic in time.

21 April 2010

Well, I know people kick the hell out of me for keeping with the faith (and it's a bigger leap than Kierkegaard took; a bigger leap than Yves Klein ) re: dodgy India-Alien obsessed PsyTrance - see, for example, Goan Wurries - but reading this via Blissblog opens a few interesting sideswipes and alternate histories - imagine where we might have ended up with another combination of:

You can see the nucleus of some really interesting things here; something similar to the plate-spinning antics of Stevo in the early years of Some Bizarre, something that could have eaasily diverted into an altogether stranger, more tentacled (tentacular?) beast...

It reminds me of some of the alternate timelines for Acid House that I imagined a while back - here mostly and then here (Where Richard NOrris has his say) - ... so many missed opportunities, so mnay angles yet to be explored... who's for suggesting Uchronie as the latest new genre? Music that purposefully re-imagines alternate musical timelines... starts afresh, sends signals down the line that don't get interrupted...

20 April 2010

This little Blisster came today; haven't heard it yet but the packaging is predictably lovely, seeing as it's a Cloudboy production. Maybe I'll play it while my students are doing their timed essays, looks like it might be motivational.

13 April 2010

The new sound of now. EBM catches fire. I'm imagining some kind of EBM Opera, using a score by Leeb and a libretto by Ogre, with choreography by Richard 23. It will be an approximate rewrite of Attack On Precinct 13 and focus on a maverick GP using sigillistic sex magic to fight off masked hordes of chiropractors and homeopaths.

All I need now is that guy from Leaether Strip to cough up that rennet he owes me...

12 April 2010

You'd have thought there'd be more Japanese EBM bands, that this scene above all others might have taken off in a big way there, might have fit Japan like a leather glove...

I'm aware that I've never been to Japan, am seeing it instead through a terrible gauze of Occidental 'otherness', aware that even when I do go I'll probably still not be able to see things straight but... I'm still curious why I don't know much about the Japanese EBM scene; why it hasn't crossed over, made itself more obvious...

I mean, there's components there, a definite cultural imperative towards the kind of metal/leather fetishism, a definite body horror / man-ipulation vibe, right the way from Mishima to Tetsuo and then way beyond... EBM would soundtrack the Japan I think of well (Albeit the one I'm thinking of is perhaps a slightly attenuated Blade Runner)... and the likes of Merzbow and particularly Masonna have been churning the man-machine interface into pure noise for years now... it seems suprising that the beats have been less forthcoming, have mostly spun off into brighter tones, to techno, to house, to disco or trance or dub...

There must be a Japanese EBM scene...

You could start here, but it's hardly propulsive; doesn't seem like an organ of mass manipulation - doesn't seem like a big enough gateway - what have these bands got to hide?

A dark heart of Japan that they think shouldn't exist? Is EBM too obvious a move?

This place seems promising, but I'm struggling to find a leader of the pack; a Klinik or a Front 242. There's no one I can find that's willing to be Skinny Puppy and face the consequences.

That said, I like the look of these guys, though they're really a lot closer to Depeche Moded J-pop than you'd imagine by the company they keep:

and you can tell by their t-shirts that they are going for the kind of Emily Strange market rather than puff-powdered, ski-goggle wearing Neuro-Trashers:

Perhaps these guys are nearer the mark. I could get into this kind of stuff:

though I guess it's still more techno than EBM, more like a messier Prodigy than a tight-balled Front Line Assembly clone. Good stuff, but not EBM..

I've recently discovered 2 Bullet and have more than a suspicion that they might be more fun than a bag of hungry cats and, judging from their influences, might be as close to a 'true' Japanese EBM band as I'm going to get. I'm certainly digging the paramilitary look:

On the same theme, they look like Strawberry Switchblade, modelled by Belmer:

But, again, there's nothing really BODY BEATING about this. It's pummelling without the body. And the machine fetshism isn't really fetishism at all; where Front 242 et al seemed to view machines as something to be wrestled with, and then commanded... the Japanese seem to take a friendlier tone; the machines are our natural extension, something to be kissed on the head rather than wrestled to the floor until they submit.

The search continues... where is the Tetsuo of Japanese EBM? It's a monster waiting to happen...

Ok, this week was gonna be all about EBM but I've just found out about Adam Ant joining Zodiac onstage for Prime Mover and wondered how this could possibly have slipped by me.

I think I remember a friend playing this at a Yeovil College Battle of the Bands or something. There may well have been a band called Nasal Dread on the bill as well. It was a long time ago. Cider wasn't 10% more expensive. You could pick live drugs in the form of hallucinogenic snails off the sides of the road in Yeovil, back then. On rainy days you'd spent hours getting to the shops, trying not to trip out on the little fellahs as they slid like fractals across the pavement...

11 April 2010

Well, it started innocently enough, the root of all this was a Front 242 track that slipped into the Shuffle Mode a few weeks back and then coincidentally I got my first cease and desist notice about another Front 242 track I'd posted (alongside a cutting stolen from Gutter) and now, well, now I'm in the middle a of one of those periodic binges of re-listening to stuff I've long since discarded

...and this time it's perhaps the least cool and least salvageable (we'll see) of all genres - EBM, which is quite possibly still going very strong in all kinds of dark holes, which probably isn't called EBM (and never really was) and which, assuredly, isn't New Beat or anything like that (a more loved cousin genre which did get a little reinvention a few years back by that Dunlop-wearing Caretaker guy) although it's Belgian by inclination and there are times, in a dark room, with a badass PA system, where the two have been known to slide around in the mud together, like all good cousins...

Which brings me to Revolting Cocks.

I'll probably be chugging my way through the likes of a:GRUMH and A Split Second and FLA and the Klinik/Dive angle and maybe DAF which I loved since I heard Kebab Traume on the C81 tape (and which was perhaps a bigger gateway band for me than almost any other) but for now, this 12" single is as good a place to start as any...

I went to see them at The Astoria in 1990 and, while they were predictably fantastic and gross and stupid (i.e. ideal 18 year old brain fodder), they were probably already on a downward spiral... we were already slightly annoyed that they didn't bring the herd of cattle onto the stage (we were expecting something to rival the Frank Tovey, Blixa Bargeld, Genesis P-Orridge ICA smashing) and I think, even then, we knew that The Cocks would morph into RevCo (Ugh!)... Beers, Steers and Queers was about to become an indie disco anthem and they were going to get over-excited at all the attention... even old ice-cream head Douglas Hurd had a crack at them before the UK gigs after Teddy Taylor brought them to the attention of the House of Commons EBM select committee (love to have been at that gig, DJ TT in da house...)

But the first few albums were good - the live album was brilliant and No Devotion was off it's time and perfect; the way it starts all sludgy and industrial and then pulls a light cord and - WHAM- it's disco-spastic. It's a fine line and they found it a difficult one to tread. When they eventually covered Let's Get Physical and Do Ya Think I'm Sexy, it was already too obvious. If they'd done That's The Way (Aha Aha) I Like It then maybe things would have turned out differently (actually, I always thought Laibach would have done that well; the way i hear it is with Laibach or The Cocks singing along) but I lost interest soon after that gig and they picked up more guitars and got sloppy with the drum programming and, well, drifted off...

Still, watching a crowd of indie kids all singing the lyrics (and samples) of Beers, Steers and Queers remains a very fond memory... especially since this was the same time period that people would sit fucking down when Sit Down came on or go spazzmental to The Mission. Seriously, The Mission. Butterfly On A Goddamn Wheel.

03 April 2010

On slightly unrelated note, Shroom Heaven by Los Massieras makes for an excellent soundtrack to two dogs fighting in a field. You know how Michael Nyman's music made even the more prosaic scenes evocative in Peter Greenaway films? Well, there you go.

Also, Exit Thru The Mirror, Child by our favorites Ice Bird Spiral makes for an excellent soundtrack to a train journey through deepest darkest Somerset. And the Mr Punch opening minutes would be an ideal soundtrack to the credits of the film of Riddley Walker, which sadly doesn't yet exist.

This is what the Mayans meant. Hauntology's just the beginning. All genres will start to crumble, a Musical Eschatology is being born, ready for the end. The Genres have been tearing apart for a long time and the consequent creation of new ones has been escalating, trying to keep pace.

Too late.

No New New Age Advanced Ambient Motor Musik Machine.

No Gola Trance.

How fitting that Hypnagogic Pop wasn't especially hypnagogic or pop.

Never liked the End of History argument but...

Simon, seems to have a cackle in his post though. He saw it coming. Played the game and will continue to play the game right to the end. My suspicion is that he was done with the genre a while back and was already looking for a some kind of fix.

And now little Wikipedia, that bastion of Peer Reviewed mulch, is kicking off..

There may be life yet, of course. Hauntologies. And a resurrection can't be impossible in a genre like this... when every turn of every timbre may cause some thud of awakening - yeah, right now it's Open University programming, old Doctor Who, Children Of The Stones but tomorrow the New Haunts might be evoking Timbaland or Jam and fucking Spoon (I hope it goes the way of LSD Nikon, loved that track) or...

01 April 2010

Just a test to see if the Apple Wytch Machine will talk to here. Never sure. Can't be. Later, thingsll happen. Last time I tried this, the Hadron Collider upended and the photons fell out. Still, without experimentation..